Alternatives To Mainstream MedicineAre Urgently Needed

Why Mainstream Medicine Is in CrisisIn England, half of us are taking prescription medication. (The Daily Telegraph, 14 december 2017) There is something worrying about this. We are told that anti-biotics, the keystone of modern medicine, are soon going to stop working, and infections are going to cause huge trouble. This is even more worrying. Another feature of mainstream medicine is this - medical miracles are promised, but take years to get to market, then start to reveal toxicity and side-effects as they are widely used. And the latest promises come at prices hardly anyone can afford. There ie too much promise and too little delivery. This is of deep concern to all of us. All these concerns together amount to a crisis on many fronts for modern western medicine. There are two main causes behind this crisis.First, some of the above problems arise because the drug companies have too much power and have become corrupt. They control government policy. They have too much influence over medicine control agencies. They extort too much money out of patients, and, for example, the NHS in the UK. Sometimes in cash grabs they raise prices for no good reason by thousands of percent. They falsify research data to keep the money pouring in. They have medicalised issues such as poor exam performance and lack of ambition, to expand their market.And they attempt to eliminate the competition. They campaign against alternative medicines and influence opinions in the scientific establishment with patronage and bribery.These are the political and economic causes of the crisis. The pharmaceutical companies have overstepped themselves and sown the seeds of their downfall. By joining the corporatocracy that globalisation has made possible and achieving more power than governments, they have made some kind of reaction against them inevitable in the long term. The other reason for the crisis is medical. Modern western medicine sees a human being as a chemical machine, where all illness is essentially physical, to be solved by chemical medicines. But a human being is more complex than that, with subtleties and depths that are beyond mechanistic thinking. Diseases manifest in as many ways as there are patients having them, but simple orthodox medications treat only the lowest common denominator. For example, they ignore the subtle differences between all the people who are suffering from “anxiety”.Diseases are seen as “things” which can be treated, but they really do not exist separately from the people who have them. There is no such thing as arthritis except in the condition of some people’s joints. There is no such thing as arthritis, there are only arthritic joints. Diseases are actually conditions of patients, they do not exist on their own.This is a very different way of looking at illness, and may be difficult to accept. But it gets support from systems science, a new kind of science which provides a more realistic view of biology and living organisms than the mechanistic view which preceded it. It shows that illness is the disorder of a complex system, not a separate entity.This means that whenever we treat a disease we are actually treating a patient. It is the patient who responds to the medicine, not the disease. The reaction the patient makes to the medicine may include side-effects, which are labelled as such because they are unwanted. But this is an arbitrary decidion. Sometimes medicines are relabelled, and are given for a different condition because of what was originally a “side-effect”. All the effects of the medicine are produced by the patient as part of one reactive process.A certain medicine may have hardly any effect on one person, and a huge effect on another. The “action” of the medicine is more of a “reaction” of the patient. Modern medicine has lost sight of the patient in its pursuit of diseases, and has paid a heavy price in toxicity and side-effects and above all in not considering the effects of the treatment on the whole person. The whole of the person can be forgotten as long as the “disease” is shown to be better. If only the disease is treated, the rest of the person may get worse. Another “disease” may appear when one is treated, so over time more and more diseases develop and need treatment and a spiral of decline sets in. This explains how old people can end up taking ten or twenty or thirty or more pills per day, and keep getting worse.In this situation of crisis alternatives to modern medicine are needed. Unfortunately the alternatives are currently being eliminated by campaigns spearheaded by media attacks on effective natural medical systems such as homeopathy and herbalism. The drug companies are pulling the strings of this campaign with invisible hands. This is not a paranoid fantasy, it is a perfectly sensible conspiracy theory. Such campaigns are only to be expected because we have allowed corporations too much influence over our lives.The future health of the planet depends on diversifying our medical treatments. But we are moving in the opposite direction, towards a drug company monopoly of one of the most important parts of our lives, our health. The crisis in mainstream medicine is an opportunity to develop other medical systems. We will need them urgently.